If we look at Nikolai Ovchinnikov the man, everything about his appointment to GUBOP seems respectable. He deserved the office. According to his official record, before entering the duma, he had been a provincial police officer for thirty years. At the time of his election as a parliamentary deputy, he was chief of police in Yekaterinburg, which is no sleepy provincial center nostalgic for past glories. It is the capital of the Urals, the hub of Sverdlovsk Province, which in turn is the Urals’ major industrial region. When Yeltsin invited the regions of Russia to “take as much sovereignty as you want,” there were serious plans to create a republic of the Urals, with Yekaterinburg as its capital. The city’s chief of police was a celebrity known to all of Russia. The Urals are a region of great mineral wealth and possess natural and industrial resources sufficient for any country to survive on. Additionally, Yekaterinburg is traditionally the turf of one of the most powerful Mafias, formerly of the Soviet Union and now of Russia. Its official designation is the Uralmash crime syndicate. Whether he likes it or not, the top police officer of Yekaterinburg finds himself combating the Uralmash Mafia.
As might be expected, a good deal of important information is not to be found in Ovchinnikov’s official service record—perhaps, indeed, anything that really matters. What kind of police chief was he? What priorities did he set? Which elements of the Mafia did he prosecute? What were his achievements? And what was the result: What kind of place was Yekaterinburg under Ovchinnikov, and what kind of place is it today?
It is not my wish to show how a police officer in the Urals rose to giddy heights in Moscow. I am much more interested in that phenomenon of Russian life known as corruption. What, in fact, is corruption? What constitutes the Russian Mafia—not as it was under Yeltsin but as it is in the Putin era? And why has Putin advanced the career of Ovchinnikov? If we analyze the way in which Ovchinnikov came to be appointed as Russia’s principal champion for combating the Mafia, we can identify the guiding principles behind appointments under Putin and his administration.
The story goes back a long way.
FEDULEV
On September 13, 2000, a news story rocked Russia. At the time, the second Chechen war was being waged, and Putin had been appointed prime minister because, unlike the other candidates, he was willing to start the conflict. In Yekaterinburg one of Russia’s largest engineering enterprises, the Uralkhimmash Corporation, its output used throughout the Russian chemical industry, was seized by the Mafia. Citizens armed with baseball bats, supported by the Yekaterinburg OMON Special Police Unit, burst into the factory’s administrative offices, caused major disorder there, and attempted to install their own director in place of the incumbent, Sergey Glotov.
Urals television duly showed the local Communists shouting, “Hurrah! The people are taking power into their own hands! Down with the capitalists!” The local trade-union leaders repeated the slogans, declaring the seizure of Uralkhimmash a “workers’ revolution” and promising that similar revolutionary renationalizations would spread throughout the country in the near future.
Although nothing was heard from President Yeltsin, nobody was surprised, because he was known to be ill. As the newly appointed prime minister, Putin was also silent. In fact, Moscow was silent. Vladimir Rushailo, then minister of internal affairs, had nothing to say in public about police officers under his authority who had stormed an enterprise on behalf of one of the sides in a dispute.
Moscow’s failure to comment spoke volumes. In Russia, such events don’t just happen. But nobody in the capital was talking.
By the evening of September 13, the workers’ revolution had quieted down somewhat; the old Uralkhimmash management, unwilling to step down, had barricaded itself in the director’s office. At this point, a veritable armored column, an armada of dapper black Jeeps, swept into the factory grounds. The special police respectfully made way for them.
From one of the Jeeps stepped a nondescript, rather short citizen wearing a good suit, expensive spectacles, and several gold chains. He was an archetypal New Russian, his face ravaged by a recent drinking spree. On his progress to the director’s office, he enjoyed the protection of a powerful bodyguard provided by the Yekaterinburg police. The special police forcibly cleared the way for them; the workers moved back grudgingly.
“Pashka’s spoiling for a fight again. He’s here for a showdown,” the Uralkhimmash employees muttered.
“Pavel Fedulev, the leading industrialist of our province and deputy of the Yekaterinburg Legislative Assembly, is attempting to restore justice in accordance with court rulings,” broadcast Yekaterinburg television, switching from shots of the concerned expression on the face of the leading industrialist to the bloodied faces of the enterprise’s defenders. Iron bars were now to be seen among the baseball bats.
The citizen in designer glasses proceeded inside and presented the beleaguered management of Uralkhimmash with a pile of documents, court rulings showing that he, the bearer, was co-owner of the enterprise and that it was his intention to install as director a person of his choosing. Accordingly, all unauthorized persons were to vacate the premises.
The citizen sat down, uninvited, in the director’s chair, his brazen demeanor reflecting his proprietorial status. After a time, during which the displaced management acquainted itself with the documents he had brought, he received a torrent of abuse (which left him unfazed) and a different collection of documents and court rulings showing that the present director was in fact the real director.
To make sense of this situation, we must embark on a further excursion into Yekaterinburg’s recent history. How did a society develop in which the seizure of such a large enterprise as Uralkhimmash was possible? And who is Pavel Anatolievich Fedulev? And why, when I asked all sorts of people in Yekaterinburg what on earth was going on, did I always receive the same reply: “It’s all Fedulev’s doing”?
HOW IT STARTED
Ten years ago, when Yeltsin was in power and democracy, as we said then, was on the rampage, Pashka Fedulev was a small-time hoodlum, extortionist, and thug. In those days Yekaterinburg was still called by its Soviet name, Sverdlovsk. Major criminal brigades were operating there, carving out their spheres of influence, but Pashka was not associated with any of them. He was a sole trader. Although he had criminal offenses trailing behind him like a bridal train, the militia did not go after him because Fedulev was small fry. In those years such individuals were jailed not because of the crimes they committed but because it was “time to put them inside,” if they failed to reach agreement with other hoodlums, spoke out of turn, or, in general, tried to throw their weight around. Behavior of this sort was not in Pashka Fedulev’s repertory. At that time he was amenable to reason.
In the early 1990s, Pashka became a businessman, like the majority of his comrades. Pashka, however, was poor. He had no access to the funds of the criminals’ central bank, despite the fact that Yekaterinburg, famous for its underworld, had one of the largest such banks in the country. As a small-time hoodlum, Pashka did not qualify for credit and thus had to accumulate his own capital. This he duly did.
Fedulev built up his capital quickly with a fiery home-produced vodka called “palenka.” The mechanism was simple. In the remoter towns and villages of Sverdlovsk Province there had existed, since the Soviet period, a number of small liquor factories. In the early Yeltsin years they, like the other state-owned factories of the era, began to fall apart; there came a time when anybody could buy, for a nominal sum placed directly in the hands of the director, as much liquor as he could drive away.